


With the greatest of ease

by JoCarthage



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Circus, Healing, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy, Trampolines, Trapeze
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 19:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1830142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint takes Bucky to a trapeze class and he gets addicted. It's part of their weekly nights out as "Brainwashing Buddies" and gives Bucky something that's entirely his own. Takes place after the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First class

“Your chest is going to hurt tomorrow,” Clint said as soon as Bucky swung down off the rig. Bucky looked up, heart still pounding. He could feel the stretch starting in his shoulders.

“I’ve done worse to myself,” he replied, voice detached.

Clint was about to reply, but Bucky continued: “When am I up next?”

Clint flopped back on his folding-chair, legs splayed, arms behind his head: “You’re after Audrey in the line-up.” He threw his head back as Bucky moved to his seat: “There’s nothing like flying. And it takes different muscles, more flexibility, is more fun, than most other activities; sex included.”

Bucky snorted and sat next to him. He watched a mid-sixties woman climb up the yellow construction ladder to the board where she would jump, hands sure, no ladder line.

His eyes wandered around the tent, absorbing the competent make-shift-ness of it. The woman working the lines protected her hands from the thick safety rope with grey gardening gloves. The ladder had chalk ingrained in its grooves, but could have been from any hardware store.

He watched the woman jump off the board, hands sure on the tape-wrapped bar. She pumped her body back, then forwards, then flat, then forwards again, then back, using that power to throw her body up over the bar, holding herself on posted arms before tossing herself at the other peak of the swing, falling face-down before twisting to her back at the last moment.

Clint let out a crude whistle and she grinned at him before she took her lines off, passing them up to the man on board.

Bucky heard Radio Red Room running an analysis of everyone here. Who moved like an athlete, who didn’t, who spoke other languages, who didn’t. He caught a flurry of movement over his right shoulder and jerked around, hands coming up, only to see a child spinning through the air on a giant yellow trampoline, spotted by an instructor in brightly-mismatched socks. The student fell back to the trampoline, laughing, and spotter smiled back. Bucky watched as he pulled a Barbie from behind himself and demonstrated on the doll how to modify her fall. The young student’s face dropped comically serious, nodding as he gestured.

Clint stretched as he got up, joking with the younger woman beside them. He walked to the ladder, dipping his hands in the chalk-bucket--as make-shift as the rest, the bucket was a standard plastic thing in chemical orange, chalk-coated as anything else in the tent. Clint threw in some last-minute stretches, arcing one arm at a time across his chest and twisting his torso.

He took a breath and then flew up the ladder as soon as the woman before him took a hold of the bar, and and then held onto the safety-holds, standing silently as he and the woman on board watched her tuck her knees up onto the bar and let her torso fly free, arching back, eyes towards where the catcher would be. That was the trick Bucky had just learned.

He caught Clint grinning at him and started his own stretches.


	2. Third class

Clint’s trick was nothing complicated, or at least that’s what he’d told Bucky.

He lied.

The first indication of his mendacity was when the woman on board lifted a two-by-four with notches in the runs of the thin ladders with safety-holds on either side of the platform. She slotted it in at about nipple height for Clint, who grinned and clambered up. 

From the ground, Bucky’s seen Clint get hooked into the safety rig--“Not because I need it, but this place doesn’t know me too well. They’ve got these tests to get out of lines, and I don’t do paper-tests.” The rig consisted of two half-inch ropes anchored to carabiners the size of Bucky’s palm, hooked into the metal rings embedded in the sides of his safety-belt.

Bucky’s eyes shot back up to where Clint balanced when at “Ready!” he bent his knees apart, hips and body leaning over open air, one hand on the steadying-pole, one on the tape-wrapped trapeze bar. 

“Hep!” the woman on board called, and Clint leapt off. The woman on board cleared to the side with the lift-board in her hand. She had with plenty of time as Clint pumped his body back, forward, then kicked up, then forward again, back, turning his head to blow her a kiss with his body in a perfect 7. Then back, forward and —

Bucky’s jaw almost dropped as Clint let go, body forming a perfect T as he flipped off the trapeze, the arcing fall looking weightless. Then Clint landed on his back and hollow-bounced to his feet.

He unhooked his lines without looking, grinning down at the woman working the ropes, and walked the net to maneuver the ropes so the woman on board could grab them with her metal hook.

Bucky was staring, still standing at the bottom of the ladder when the woman behind him tapped his shoulder:

“Aren’t you up after Audrey?”

Bucky shook his head and hooked into the ladder lines--they knew and trusted him even less than Clint--and began the climb, going over the split he’d just learned between his breaths.


	3. After his fourth class

Bucky was loitering outside of the metro station. He knew he could go home on his own, and he also knew he could sit in the tent waiting for Clint to finish talking with the instructors. But he didn’t have anyone he wanted to make small-talk with yet, and he liked the company.

He tucked his hip against the black-painted railing that lined the entrance. He pressed himself back, both trying to keep his bulk out of the way of the busy people trying catch some relief from the summer rain.

He could still trace out the tactics on their faces, where he’d grab, shoot, stab, grip for a throw across the street. He’d guess at their best interrogation tactics, the signs they were breaking.

Clint called his Radio Station LOKI. Bucky thought of it as Radio Red Room. It was like living with a nasty stranger living in his mind, one who muttered alongside everything he said and did. He hoped one day the stranger would move out, would quiet down, or maybe just get nicer.

In the meantime, he was trying to hear the stranger out. Hear what he was whispering, so he knew if he started acting on the stranger’s instructions he knew where they came from.

Trapeze though, it was so new he had little to nothing for the stranger to compare it with. It was so impractical, flying high in the air, spinning away. It didn’t contribute to his battle-readiness. It didn’t make him a better shot, or help him infiltrate any particularly attractive asset. The stranger was confused and silent.

Not that he was needed for those kinds of missions anymore, or necessary welcome on them. But the stranger, you could say a lot was wrong with him, but at least he was useful. At least the Red Room had found him useful; not a burden.

He shared a group therapy session with some agents who were struggling with eating disorders. They talked about “the body” and what it needed. He wished he could talk about “the stranger” without giving him more power than he already had.

One of the them had said in class that she had the body of the binge eater, but the habits of an anorexic. Then she’d paused, eyes closing, making her golden eye-shadow clearer, and said: “That was a fucked up thing to say, wasn’t it?”

They’d all nodded. It was fucked up. And that self-awareness, that was what he wanted out of that group, out of his new way of living. He spent all of his time second-guessing himself, watching himself, making sure the stranger stayed as far away from the steering wheel of his life as he could.

The only time he wasn’t self-policing were the bare moments when he flew, when he only had the responsibility to protect himself and maybe learning something new. It was a moment and a space and an experience of choice. The choices only hurt him, but that was a relief from having to protect everyone else from himself. He could be free to fall or fly, and it was all his choice.


	4. Sixth class

“Ready.” The woman working the board said, projecting so the woman on ropes below could get ready. Bucky’s knees bent, fingers tighter on the bar in front of him.

“Hep!” she called and he was off, toes pointed, body hanging. No power-building swing for him yet, but he would get there soon.

“First position!” Called the woman on ropes just before he hit the peak of his swing. He swung his legs up, one bent at the knee, entirely upside-down.

He glanced at her and then tucked his head back in as he swung through the bottom of the arc, thigh pressed against the bar and hands firm, watching the strength of his metal hand. He had a moment to think that there was always one thing that felt perfect--his grip, this time--and one thing that was off--his foot placement, again—then he heard her call “Final!”

He leaned his hips into it, unfurling his bent leg and locking himself into an upside-down split at the top of his arc. He heard Clint’s piercing wolf-whistle and dug in the corners of his mouth. Another swing, this one seeming impossibly faster as he kept his body from rocking forwards again and then--

“Hep!”

He let go, hands out, thumbs pointing to where the catcher’s arms would be when he did this for real, head straight. Against every instinct, he let himself fall on his face, not turning, not slapping the ground, not rolling. He got up, walked unsteadily to the side of the net and flipped himself forward over, using the colorfully-taped handholds.

As he waited for the woman on ropes to unhook the lines on his safety-belt, he caught Clint’s eye. A quick thumb’s up and a grin, before Clint turned back to the preteen in front of him in line, gesturing with quick hands how she could re-wind her wraps to avoid rips on her palms.

“Good job locking in that split,” said the woman on ropes. When Bucky had walked in on the first day, she’d been the only one he’d clearly identified as a potential threat. Her shoulders were broad and well-muscled, and her hands hard. She quirked the corners of her mouth at him, like she had each of the page 5 weeks he’d come by with Clint for their “Brainwashing Buddies” nights out. He liked this form of therapy much better than the talking kind, no matter what Steve encouraged.

“Next time, space you hands a little wider. It will give you more space to get through, and make the move to ‘final’ smoother. But good work.”

She walked away to guide the released ropes back to the board, and Bucky walked towards Clint. He valued this incremental, voluntary learning. He worked for it, and it was his in a way no forced-march learning could be. These, this small smile and tiny step and sore shoulders, these were his.

And it got him out, got him away from the four white walls of his SHIELD-issued temporary housing. It flew in the face of his conviction if he could only keep himself away from other people he could avoid hurting them.

He could also play at human here, though his bionic arm undercut that from being anything more than a polite fiction on the part of his classmates.

He and Clint had made a point of avoiding sharing their Avengers-status. They didn’t lie if people who’d see them on TV asked. But their friends in the class didn’t ask about it more than once, and focused on on how much they were improving their swings, how silly Clint was for not just coming out with it and actually telling the instructors know he’d grown up in the circus rather than politely “learning” and doing every trick perfectly.

And they weren’t the only weird ones here. More than the fellowship and the exploration of a different way of using his body, Bucky valued that weirdness. 

People showed their affirmative lack of allegiance to normality with crazy-colored socks and tights. They wore the silliest t-shirts they could find, talked about their complex and odd relationships. One woman ran a weekly contest to guess something esoteric. One of the staff’s favorite kind of local, Ohio-only, frozen candy. What were on her new tights at home.

And, frankly, their weirdest thing about everyone there is they showed up for trapeze every week. Particularly in D.C., a city where the wrong patterned tie could get you a write-up in Politico.

It made him feel like he could find a home in this world, one that fit him better than the one he’d grown up in. To see people engaging in the act of creating a new and more accepting culture between turns flinging themselves into the air.


	5. After his twelfth class

Bucky’s shoulders were sore and he smelled like chalk. He was on the metro home, scrunched up with his knees braced against the molded plastic seat in front of him. Clint had side-eyed this seating arrangement, thinking he was trying to take up as little space as possible.

But it wasn’t that. It was about having his body stable against the movements of the traincar, about having a good brace he could control. When he sat with his feet on the ground and et his body rock with the traincar, his hips started to ache and he started to feel edgy. His body didn’t rest as easily as they had before decades of cryofreezing.

He could feel where the safety belt still bruised his stomach, feel the dry ache of his hands where the chalk had embedded. He nursed these small hurts, though now less to make them hurt more and more to understand how he came by them, and whether he could avoid them in the future.

He let his eyes unfocus, sure for these few seconds he was safe in the nearly empty traincar. He thought about the planche he was learning. How odd it was to swing with his head down, how light his body felt the first time he’d gotten the timing right and slide his legs up.

He’d felt the weight in his shoulders, his entire body held by a few strands of muscle and slips of tendons. That night, for the first time in a long time, he trusted his body.

Not all the way. He still choked his movements, couldn’t put his full power behind his swing, using every piece of himself. He kept a reserve. But he could tell his body to invert, to make itself lithe and simple and easy and then it would just do it. It hadn’t hurt anyone else in months.

Even the arm was starting to feel less like an enemy, and more like a piece of a larger whole, that included his mind and his own conscience and his heart. It wasn’t just trapeze. Client recommended committing to doing one new hard thing in every week. This week, he was riding the metro alone; last week he’d applied for a credit card. The first hard thing was joining the trapeze class.

These tasks built on each other. Because he did trapeze, he had something to talk about at the bank. Because he had a credit card, he could buy his own metro pass. He thought about it, and next week he might try another class. He’d heard trampoline helped with aerial awareness, and was required for Level 2 trapeze students, called Frequent Flyers.


	6. Fifteenth class

“You’ll know when to let go, when the wind is silent in your ears.”

Bucky nodded. They’d tried this before, weeks ago, but he’d panicked, had to have his weight taken away from his by the man on ropes. He’d said something quiet about a well-founded fear of initiating free-fall, and they’d gone back to calling his fall for him. As he climbed, he thought about the wind tunnel he’d trained in for aerial exfiltration. He thought about how nothing had ever seemed as silent as when they shut off the massive fans and let him down from the plane.

He thought about how he’d seen a dummy smash against a wall with the force of the unfiltered wind, and how his fingers had ached with the cold the minute he got onto the machine.

Standing on the platform, mostly what he thought about was how open the space around him was, how he could step one way or the other and fall. He always did this to himself, to force himself to focus before he took the bar. 

_Look down, remind him he could die if he fell, grip the bar, and then jump into the hole in the air above the net._

It was the safest way he’d found to handle his interest in hurting himself. To channel it. He’d also had a life-long tendency to drift that he’d controlled as a sniper, but came back when he was relaxed. He focused entirely on “Hep!”

He arched his back, moving to the calls “Back, forward, and flat, forward, back...”

He swung 4 times and then heard the call: “On your own time.”

He nodded and let his body hang loose, and listened to the sound of the wind in his ears as he swang. The tone curved down, then, for a moment: silence.

He dropped, crossing his arms over his chest and letting the net sway down and pop him back up, then a second bounce, then he got up, undid his own lines, got off the net through the swing-down.

“Good job,” the woman on ropes said. “You got the timing just right. Do another warm-up and keep your 7 tight. But good job.”


	7. Seventeenth class

“You’re superheroes?” 

The boy was all of 6, and yep, there was a scrunched Captain American t-shirt melded into his stomach by the safety-belt. He had Sponge Bob sox on.

Bucky wondered if Steve had ever been that blond, that sure of his welcome.

“Not me--but that one,” he pointed conspiratorially over his shoulder to where Hawkeye was watching his last flip on the grainy television, hand tucked under his chin.

Bucky knelt, and the boy’s face bobbed down with him. He had Steve’s eyes, cornflower blue with streaks of the sky around the edges.

He hammed up a stage whisper: “He’s a superhero. He fought the aliens in New York.”

The boy’s eyes got wide and he took a step back. His voice was a real whisper: “Does he know,” as words failed him, he pointed to his chest. Bucky nodded.

“Yep, they’re friends. Hey, you’re staying for the rest of class?” The boy nodded. Bucky pulled his phone out of his bag. He sent a text before slipping it back.

“Aside from,” and Bucky gestured at his chest, “who’s your favorite?”

Bucky leaned back a bit, the boy’s mother having caught his eye quizzically. He tried to give his best I’m-not-a-murderer smile, and she seemed unexpectedly reassured. The boy was watching his face, clearly catching his check-in.

“I like Thor. He’s blond--like me!”

Bucky nodded, chuckling. “He is at that.” He looked over the line, and saw only one person on the board. He tried to remember the line-up, but as he was thinking the boy jumped, saying: “I’m up!” before scampering up the ladder.

No ladder lines Bucky noted. He refused to feel jealous of a child. His bag buzzed and he reached in, tipping the screen to face himself.

He grinned, before getting back to the important business of stretching his arms and shoulders out.

He heard the grumble of Steve’s bike. He’d been at the apartment they chose together a few blocks over and would get a kick out of this. As he climbed up the ladder, Bucky kept his eyes to himself. He hoped he’d brought the shield--the kid would get such a kick out of it. And Steve hadn’t seen his pull-over trick.


	8. First class

Bucky Barnes was deeply dubious about the trampoline.

“You need it to advance in trapeze,” Clint said.

“You’ll enjoy it, even without safety-lines” the Audrey said.

“Nice to meet you,” said the man in wildly mismatching socks. “Are you bouncing tonight?”

Bucky nodded. The man paused and continued in a low voice: “If that,” he waved to Bucky’s arm, “gets uncomfortable and you’re ok with it, I can teach without it attached.” He flashed a crooked smile. “As long as you know your body and how it moves, we’ll figure out a way for you to get signed off and have some fun.”

Bucky appreciated there were no questions about his arm puncturing the taut plastic, because he’d asked Stark to make sure it wouldn’t. He wished there were a way to do this with safety-belts.

Bucky climbed up onto the trampoline, over kinetic energy-eating blue foam mats. The instructor had grey hair and a wiry frame. Less bulky than the catchers on the trapeze, less shaved than the steely-eyed woman working the silks.

“So, tell me about your history in the air,” he asked and Buck’s eyes snapped back from where the other class was doing warm-ups on the trapeze. 

He replied, “I was in the army,” _careful to not say whose,_ “and have been told I have good aerial awareness.” His inner Steve forced him to add: “But no trampoline experience.”

“We’ll get you started on the warm-up then.” He said, then went to greet the other two students. A woman in some kind of flexible-wear jeans, a man in a worn-out grey t-shirt and basketball shorts that stopped above his hairy knees.

Bucky had a simple initial routine—tuck, feet down, pike, feet own, straddle, feet down, repeat. He did it a few times, enough that the instructor got a gauge on how long he took to learn new concepts and get his body to respond to them.

He was waved off the trampoline to sit tailor-style next to the woman. She had a modern cut to her hair, much longer in the front and shorter in the back. The sunlight looked different on a day of the week he wasn't usually in the tent. The man stood to warm-up, making clear he carried all of his tension in his shoulders. Bucky bet some kind of federal agency, probably law enforcement.

One of the most bizarre things about living and working in Washington D.C. was meeting hundreds of people that everyone else would consider faceless bureaucrats. And realizing they hobbies as odd as circus-work. Bucky’d gotten to the point that he pretended everyone on the metro did circus work, just to make them less boring.

It was Bucky’s turn again, and the instructor—Ron, his memory supplied—showed him a seat drop. It involved bouncing, putting his legs in front of him, and letting himself fall through the air until he hit, ankles and thighs at the same time, then bounced back to standing. Bucky’s eyes narrowed. He still gritted his teeth when he fell on his own time, and appreciated the cinch of the safety belt at times like that.

He tried anyway and couldn’t seem make himself let himself fall. The first time, he landed on his knees. The second, in a crouch. The instructor let him get back onto his feet and straighten his clothes, breathing between his teeth, then asked him to sit again, legs out in front in a pike.

Then he pushed on the trampoline beside him, making Bucky bounce just a bit. He caught an inch of air, then two, then three. Eventually he got up to a foot, then panicked, caught himself and landed a bit crooked. The world failed to end. The trampoline was a lot more forgiving than he’d expected.

He finished his turn still stumbling and Radio Red Room was blaring loud and caustic as he walked back to his seat. He sat, tailor-style, and watched the other students. After the man went, he started to be able to hear his breathing again. He let his breath touch down in the pit of his stomach. He thought about music, and the rhythm of it.

It was his turn. He stood, stepping over the bouncing trampoline, making eye-contact with the instructor and beginning to bounce. In-breath and he was up and down. Out-breath and he was up and down. Then he took an in-breath, thought of the silence right before he let go of the bar and the white tent roof, and let himself drop. He hit, trampoline rough against his hands, and then, just like the net, it threw up him back up, and he came to standing. He looked at the instructor. The man’s grin was huge and he gestured at the trampoline:

“You got it. Keep going.”

Bucky did.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're curious about any of the tricks involved, comment and I'll share some videos. There are places like the one Bucky and Clint go to all around the U.S. and around the world. They are great fun. Come hang-out with me on tumblr at jocarthage.tumblr.com


End file.
